


Revel

by byebyeskylark



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-25 21:11:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12541308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byebyeskylark/pseuds/byebyeskylark
Summary: Dick is invited to a party.





	Revel

**Author's Note:**

> For Day 2 of the 2017 Batfam Halloween Content War: Celebration

Robin had been dismissed for the night, not without hesitation.

Dick had seen the way Batman shifted uncomfortably when he suggested Robin make his way home alone. He didn’t like letting eleven-year-old Robin too far out of his sight on Gotham’s streets. But Gordon was strongly hinting that the crime scene photos he needed Batman to look at weren’t suitable for such a young vigilante and Dick had cheerfully ducked out the window with a wave to the cranky dads.

He didn’t really want to see the crime scene photos. There’d be time enough for all the gross stuff when he was older. And he liked knowing that Bruce and the Commish wanted to protect him from stuff like that.

So he was in a good mood as he swung, ran, and flipped his way across Gotham’s skyline, snaking his way north from police headquarters. It would take him a long time to make his way home on foot, but Batman would catch up with him in the car eventually. They knew their routes well and could criss-cross each other’s paths accurately.

Instead of grappling across the bridge to Midtown Dick spotted a ferry about to leave and sat on the roof of it. In the dark no one saw him as he sat still and quiet, enjoying the sound of the waves beneath them and the cool breeze blowing across the river.

By the time they reached the other dock – not a direct route across, but one that took them several blocks down the river – he was shivering and had pulled his cape around him, wondering if running the bridge wouldn’t have been smarter. Oh, well.

Once the passengers had disembarked he darted off the side of the large boat and stuck to shadows to leap up to street level and thence to the rooftops.

Dick ran, freewheeling, across the roofs, steering away from the busier thoroughfares and towards Midtown’s quieter areas. Redevelopment left pockets for criminals to exploit.

He paused on the roof of a four story office building. Everything should be quiet here, but he heard fiddling. It was faint. But definitely a fiddle. It reminded him of home, of sneaking out of his family’s trailer to listen to the adults telling stories and playing music around one of the circus’ campfires.

They didn’t always have campfires, it depended on where they stopped and how far outside of town they had to stay. But the circus performers had many talents, and they’d sing and play battered instruments at gatherings when little Dickie Grayson was supposed to be in bed.

Dick took a right instead of a left off the building, swinging down a different street than they usually patrolled. He followed the fiddle.

It lead him to a hollowed out shell of a building. A fire, if he was thinking of the right place, had gutted this pre-War behemoth. It had been one of the city’s first department stores, filled with grandiose finishes and studded with elements fit for the ruling class.

It had later been divided into weirdly haphazard apartments, and now it was a carapace: the glorious exterior remained, curli-cued and ornately decorated, but there was no roof and the debris had only recently been cleared and the maw of the basement covered over with new, sturdy concrete.

The huge, open space of the new first floor was dotted with construction materials, long boards propping up the exterior walls, and half-finished pillars, but mostly it was empty.

It should have been empty.

Dick – perched on what remained of a deep third floor window sill – saw dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred or more, people swirling with reckless abandon through the space. The twirling dancers formed a loose, haphazard ring as they somehow unerringly dodged stacks of cement blocks and pipes and wooden beams.

He couldn’t help but grin at the beauty of it. What a perfect spot for a party!

Every figure below him seemed to be dressed in some elaborate costume. A man dressed like a tree slowly waltzed his fish-headed partner through the faster dancers while a group of much smaller bird-like costumes flitted around the periphery of the gathering. It almost looked to Dick like they were flying.

A woman with beautiful ebony skin and black horns spiraling up from her head leapt and spun without ever once tripping on her glittering black ball gown. A man with tiger stripes on his face prowled through the crowd in his polished tailcoat, occasionally grabbing a green haired, green skinned lady from the crowd and tossing her aloft as she laughed.

Dick could just glimpse the musicians in the center of the group, a drummer, a fiddler, and some other figures standing still while the rest flashed around them in continuous movement.

He was concentrating, trying to figure out how the leg’s on the satyr’s costume worked, when suddenly the entire assembly stopped and looked up at him.

The music had stopped when the dancers did and he stared at them as they stared up at him in silence.

Dick had confidently stared down a number of Gotham’s most dangerous criminals, and yet he definitely did not like the way these people were looking at him. He felt danger creeping up his spine the longer the silence lasted. Why did some of their eyes look so odd?

“Dang-nabbit!” cried a short man in a brown tweed three-piece suit, and he flung his cap to the ground and jumped on it in a cartoonish move Dick would have laughed at in any other circumstances.

“Shut UP, Mort,” hissed someone in the crowd.

“He’s going to ruin our fun. NO sense of humor, no Gotham in him, the little desert rat-”

“Nonsense.”

The crowd parted for a tall, slender woman with copper skin and blue-black hair cropped short to frame her sharp cheekbones. She wore simple blue jeans and a white tank top.

“You need to pay better attention, Mort,” she scolded. Her tone was light, but the little man immediately shrank in on himself, wringing the hat he’d picked back up.

She smiled up at Dick.

“This is Robin the First. I’m sure he has no intention of breaking up our little gathering.”

Dick felt like this woman could see right through the lenses of his mask. Yet he felt much safer, now that she stood between him and the crowd. He’d never looked at anyone in his life and felt so immediately certain that they meant him no harm.

“Of course not!” he said, yelling only a little. “I love your music. And your costumes!”

He smiled widely at them, swinging his legs where they dangled from the window sill, and hoping they’d trust him not to snitch.

Her eyes sparkled in the dim light as her smile widened over bright white teeth. She held up a hand to him.

“Perhaps you’d like to join us for a while, young Master Robin?”

“Sure!”

Dick pushed himself off the ledge – this was the point when someone usually gasped, but no one in the crowd made a sound – and spun so that he could grab the sill of the second floor window and push himself off the wall again. In midair, much closer to the ground this time, he turned again so that when he finally hit the floor and rolled, he popped back up on his feet to face the assembly.

He gave the tall woman his most elaborate bow, the one his mother had always said was “Too much, Dick, it’s an acknowledgement, not another trick.” And this time he had a cape to flourish! He could clearly picture the way his mother would roll her eyes (good-naturedly) if she could see him now.

Still smiling, the woman had a burnished glow to her as she curtsied deeply. Dick had seen a similar trick before: the costume mistress of the circus had been a great dancer in her youth. She made any outfit, from pants to grubby overalls, look like wide skirts when she put on her “ballerina” posture and made a courtesy. This woman made scruffy flare jeans look regal.

Dick took the woman’s outstretched hand and they turned toward the dancers, who now looked much friendlier, if stranger. He still couldn’t figure out how the satyr’s legs made that backward joint thing look so real.

He heard one of the musicians, deep within the crowd, count them in, and the music started anew in a lively, joyful jig. The tall woman and Dick bounced and spun hand in hand through several turns of the circle, laughing along with other dancers around them, before she melted into the crowd and Dick found himself running and tumbling along with other people.

For a while he and a boy in a happy-looking frog’s mask took turns mirroring each other’s backflips and cartwheels, playing a friendly game of “Anything You Can Do…” Then the small Mort appeared, his eyes crinkling up with mirth now that he wasn’t angry. He offered Dick a piece of cake held out on a handkerchief, his upper body held still and seemingly relaxed while his legs jigged merrily away beneath him. Dick wondered how he kept up with all the taller folks – even Dick was taller than him.

He shook his head with a polite “No, thank you!” shouted over the music. Alfred always worried if he didn’t clean his plate of whatever snack or meal was served post-patrol.

Mort smiled broadly at him, chuckling, and disappeared into the crowd. A tall, pale man with milk-white hair and orange eyes in a brocade surcoat nodded solemnly at Dick as he steered what looked like a living statue made of metal pipes and bits of broken mirror gracefully through the crowd.

As Dick came up out of a back walkover he spotted a gargoyle that looked just like the ones on the old Federal building. He wanted to say how impressed he was that the material looked so much like metal, but no one seemed to be talking much and he was starting to breathe hard with the constant motion.

After a few more circuits the song didn’t end, but morphed into something different. Dick expected it to slow down, but instead it grew more intense. Full of something sharper and deeper, the notes faster and harder as it swelled and the crowd took a collective breath as it prepared itself to match the new pace.

Dick stumbled ever so slightly as a teenage girl with nut-brown skin and fangs spun him in an enthusiastic circle, and the tall woman appeared next to him. She plucked him from the girl’s arms and suddenly they were outside the circle of dancers.

Dick was surprised to find he was sweating and breathing hard. He smiled up at his rescuer.

“Thank you for dancing with us, Master Robin,” Her black eyes were kind as she smiled down at him. She wasn’t breathing hard at all.

Dick pushed his sweat-damp hair off his forehead.

“Thanks for inviting me!” he panted, “Do you have parties like this a lot?”

“Oh, yes, quite regularly,” she turned him around and started steering him toward the front doors of the building’s husk.

“Maybe I’ll find you again sometime,” Dick said, savoring the sounds of the music behind them. It already sounded farther away.

“Maybe,” she said. The reached the doors, standing wide open to the street. She faced Dick and showed her pearly teeth in another broad smile. He couldn’t help but match it.

“You really are a bright little shadow for him,” she said with a laugh, “No wonder you found us tonight.”

She suddenly leaned down and kissed his forehead before giving him a gentle push toward the doors.

“Take care, you little contradiction!”

Dick stepped out onto the street lit by street lamps and took a deep breath of the cool, autumn air. He turned back to say goodbye.

The doors were boarded up with plywood. There was no fiddle, no laughter on the air. Only the noise of city traffic several blocks away and the distant whine of a plane as it lined up to land at the airport.

For a brief moment Dick felt totally bereft. But then the spot where the woman had kissed him tingled, and the empty feeling was rapidly replaced with the memory of the buoyancy and freedom he’d felt while dancing. Of the joy and the energy the music had inspired.

He wondered vaguely why he was standing there staring at the dumb old doors. The molded stone around them was certainly pretty. Maybe that was why he’d stopped to get a closer look.

Dick shook himself and bounced back up toward the rooftops, feeling light and happy. And tired. Bed would feel good tonight. Bad guys stopped. Batman feeling confident enough in him to let him head out on his own while he talked to Gordon.

It had been a good night.

______________

“Don’t let Master Richard fool you, he got into plenty of trouble as a child,” Alfred said as he pulled a sheet of scones out of the oven.

Damian scowled down into his tea, his back ramrod straight as he added honey.

Dick was sitting next to Damian, his upper body slumped over the bar of the kitchen island, his head propped up on one hand, the other curled around a mug of tea. He smiled tiredly.

“It’s not the same as the time I broke the chandelier,” he protested.

“No, indeed. I was thinking of the first time Master Bruce let you ‘off-lead,’ so to speak, and you didn’t turn up again for five hours.” Alfred nudged the scones off the pan and onto cooling racks.

“Couldn’t explain how you’d lost track of time! But you were sorry, poor lad,” Alfred said fondly, “Scared us half to death. I’m sure Master Bruce was harder on you than he needed to be.”

“What distracted you?” Damian asked. He watched as Dick’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. For a moment they looked oddly hazy and unfocused.

“You know? I don’t even remember.”

A wide grin stole over Grayson’s face, the kind that Damian saw more often these days, since Father had returned, and Todd was less…annoying, and their so-called “family” had settled into a halting sort of routine.

“But I’m sure it was worth it.”


End file.
